bookshelf

RAISING THE CURVE

Name: RAISING THE CURVE
Author: Ron Berler
ISBN: 978-0-425-25268-0

A YEAR INSIDE ONE OF AMERICA'S 45,000 FAILING PUBLIC SCHOOLS

by Ron Berler ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2013

Though the story is hardly unique, Berler’s ability to recount the struggles of failing schools through the viewpoints of...

bookshelf

A journalist’s exposé of a year spent inside a fifth-grade classroom in one of America’s struggling schools.

At the beginning of the 2010 school year, journalist Berler took his seat in Mr. Morey’s classroom, focusing his attention on the teacher’s struggles to get through to the students. Yet as Berler soon learned, Morey was hardly the problem. Nor was Brookside Elementary’s principal, its literary specialist or the parents or students themselves. Rather, the blame for the school’s failures seemed to spread among all parties, a realization that provides staggeringly little direction for where the solutions might start. A specter shrouding Berler’s book is the teachers’ fear of their students’ impending standardized tests, the results of which have long-reaching ramifications for their own futures as educators. As Berler reveals, this high-stakes academic environment makes winners and losers—not of individuals, but the schools themselves, providing a less-than-ideal learning situation for the students and their anxiety-ridden teachers. When a student admitted to cheating, she admitted her motive as well: “Mr. Morey said the test was important, and I didn’t study, so I copied off somebody,” she explained. Simplistic as it was, this mea culpa offers the most insight of all—recognition that students want to succeed for their teachers, even if they don’t understand the value of learning for themselves. Equally troubling was Morey’s begrudging admission to occasionally teaching his students “test strategies” rather than course material—an illustration that points toward a shared understanding that it is better to learn to game the system, rather than try to fix it.

Though the story is hardly unique, Berler’s ability to recount the struggles of failing schools through the viewpoints of its primary players—students, teachers and administrators—provides new insight on an old saga.

Pub Date: March 5, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-425-25268-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013

Categories:

EDUCATION

bookshelf

INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE DECLINE, THE DECEPTION, THE DOGMAS

by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993

bookshelf

American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.

Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993

ISBN: 0-02-930330-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992

Categories:

EDUCATION

- BOOK REVIEW
SOCIAL JUSTICE FALLACIES
by Thomas Sowell

- BOOK REVIEW
WEALTH, POVERTY AND POLITICS
by Thomas Sowell

- BOOK REVIEW
INTELLECTUALS AND RACE
by Thomas Sowell

bookshelf

THE ABOLITION OF MAN

by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1947

bookshelf

The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.